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Slow backups of VHD's with Acronis B&R 10.0.11345 and compression

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We are currently using Acronis on our 2008 R2 x64 Windows servers to backup guest systems by just taking a full backup of the .vhd files used by the guest.

I am wanting to use compression to shrink the images, but the backup process then takes too long, about 14hrs. When watching the backup that runs with full compression we only get about 3-10MB/s data movement and at most 15% CPU usage.

If I turn off compression I can get about 50-60MB/s of data throughput to the backup location. The backup location is another drive on a server across gigabit Ethernet.

The server that is doing the backups is a run of the mill Dell Poweredge 2950, Perc6 Raid card, 8GB RAM, Dual 2.5GHz Quad Cores, 2x146GB 15k SAS Drive RAID 1 for OS, 4 x 300GB 15k SAS RAID 10 for Guest OS's.

Also wanted to mention I am having the same symptoms on another duplicate power edge server, but with faster proccesors, more RAM, but with a little slower HD's.

What can be done to speed up the compressed backups? Also why doesn't Acronis utilize more resources?

Thanks

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Hello Paul Immoos,

Thank you very much for your post. I will do my best to assist you.

Maximum compression takes the longest time to create a backup. Have you tried changing backup performance options in the backup options? You can tweak backup priority, by default it is on low and hard drive writing speed. Please check page 56 in our User Guide for additional information.

Usually we recommend to use compression if the backup is saved to removable media, to save space. However, depending on the types of files on the disk, compression may not be practical. If there are already compressed files they will not be compressed further.

If you feel that you need to resolve this issue, please submit a support request and I am confident we will be able to come up with a solution for this.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Backup Priority and Hard Drive Writing are all set to maximum. I am just backing up VHD's and the compression versus no compression of Windows Backup Server is needed. I want to figure out why barely no system resources are being used by Acronis during the backup process.